The Federal Circuit held that the USPTO cannot reduce patent term adjustment by a period during which the applicant could not have taken any action to advance prosecution, limiting PTA deductions to periods of actual applicant delay.
The Supreme Court held that the AIA preserved pre-AIA law on the ‘on sale’ bar: a confidential commercial sale of an invention more than one year before the patent application triggers the bar, even if the invention’s details remain secret.
The Federal Circuit held that the judicially created doctrine of obviousness-type double patenting cannot be used to cut short a patent term extension lawfully granted by statute, affirming Novartis’s extended patent protection for its multiple sclerosis drug Gilenya.
The Federal Circuit reversed a district court’s summary judgment finding written description inadequacy for Nevro’s spinal cord stimulation patents, holding that the specification’s disclosure of the claimed frequency ranges combined with paresthesia-free stimulation raised genuine issues of material fact about whether a skilled artisan would have recognized the inventor’s possession of the full claimed range.
The Federal Circuit vacated a $140 million patent damages award, holding that the entire market value rule cannot be used to calculate damages when accused products have valuable features beyond the patented invention.
The Federal Circuit held that a company that had built a manufacturing facility and planned commercial activity within the scope of a challenged patent had Article III standing to appeal an adverse IPR decision, even without being accused of infringement.
Sitting en banc, the Federal Circuit held that the IPR one-year time bar under 35 U.S.C. § 315(b) is triggered when a defendant is served with a patent infringement complaint, even if that complaint is later voluntarily dismissed without prejudice.
The Federal Circuit dismissed an IPR petitioner’s appeal for lack of Article III standing, holding that a party must show concrete plans for activity creating a substantial risk of infringement — not just status as a competitor — to have standing to challenge an adverse PTAB decision in court.
The Federal Circuit vacated a PTAB decision that had rejected a trade show catalog as prior art, holding that materials publicly distributed at industry events can qualify as “printed publications” under 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) even if they were not formally indexed or archived.
The Federal Circuit held that tribal sovereign immunity cannot be used to shield patents from inter partes review, rejecting a controversial licensing arrangement between Allergan and the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe designed to avoid IPR challenges to Restasis patents.
The Supreme Court held that a patent holder can recover lost foreign profits as damages when a domestic act of infringement under § 271(f) caused those foreign profits to be lost.
The Federal Circuit addressed claim differentiation and claim construction for Teleflex’s coronary sinus lead placement patent — holding that where a dependent claim adds a specific limitation, the corresponding independent claim must be broader, and applying this principle to construe lead placement method claims in a dispute between cardiac device makers.
The Federal Circuit held that in states with multiple judicial districts, a domestic corporation “resides” for patent venue purposes only in the single district where its principal place of business or registered office is located, tightening venue rules after TC Heartland.
The Federal Circuit held that the patent venue statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1400(b), does not apply to alien (foreign) corporate defendants, who remain subject to suit for patent infringement in any U.S. district where they are subject to personal jurisdiction.
The Supreme Court held 5-4 that when the USPTO institutes an inter partes review, it must adjudicate every claim challenged in the petition — rejecting the PTO’s practice of instituting IPR on only some of the challenged claims and leaving other claims unreviewable.
The Supreme Court held 7-2 that inter partes review does not violate Article III or the Seventh Amendment — because patents are public franchises granted by the government, which may reclaim or modify them through an executive agency proceeding without a jury trial, upholding the America Invents Act’s most powerful patent challenge mechanism.
The Federal Circuit reversed a PTAB obviousness ruling against a wireless networking patent, holding that “common sense” cannot substitute for real evidentiary support when a prior art reference is missing a claimed limitation, particularly for complex technology.
The Federal Circuit vacated a claim preclusion ruling against SimpleAir, holding that filing a terminal disclaimer in a continuation patent does not create a presumption that the continuation’s claims are patentably indistinct from the parent, and courts must compare actual claim scope before finding preclusion.
The Federal Circuit confirmed that patent damages can be apportioned through the royalty rate rather than the royalty base, but vacated a $48 million award because the patent owner’s damages expert failed to adequately explain how the Georgia-Pacific factors supported the proposed royalty rate.
The Federal Circuit, sitting en banc, overruled Achates and held that §315(b) time-bar determinations by the PTAB are subject to judicial review, rejecting the argument that all IPR institution decisions are unreviewable.
An en banc Federal Circuit held that in inter partes review proceedings, the petitioner — not the patent owner — bears the burden of proving that proposed amended claims are unpatentable, overturning years of PTAB practice that had effectively blocked most patent owner amendment efforts.
The Federal Circuit reversed summary judgment of non-infringement in a divided infringement case, holding that the ‘direction and control’ standard from Akamai v. Limelight could be satisfied where one party conditions participation in an activity on performance of a method step by another party — applying the standard to luggage locks and TSA inspection agreements.
The Federal Circuit granted mandamus to Cray and set forth a three-part test for what constitutes a ‘regular and established place of business’ under the patent venue statute — rejecting the Eastern District of Texas’s expansive four-factor test and clarifying that employees’ homes and remote workers in a district do not, by themselves, establish venue.
The Federal Circuit held that the federal government qualifies as a ‘person’ under the America Invents Act and may petition for covered business method (CBM) review at the PTAB — a ruling the Supreme Court reversed in 2019, holding that the government is not a ‘person’ for AIA post-grant proceedings.
The Federal Circuit held that IPR estoppel under § 315(e)(2) does not extend to prior art grounds based on patents or printed publications that the petitioner could not have raised in IPR — specifically that prior art systems and physical products (which cannot be raised in IPR) are not subject to the IPR estoppel bar in subsequent district court litigation.
The Supreme Court held 7-1 that authorized patent sales both domestically and abroad exhaust all U.S. patent rights in the sold item — eliminating Lexmark’s attempt to use conditional patent licenses to control post-sale use and the Federal Circuit’s rule allowing foreign sales to preserve domestic patent rights.
The Supreme Court held that the patent venue statute, § 1400(b), is the sole provision governing where patent suits may be filed, and that a corporation ‘resides’ only in its state of incorporation for patent venue purposes.
The Federal Circuit held that a secret commercial sale — where the existence of the sale agreement was publicly disclosed but the details of the invention were kept confidential — triggers the on-sale bar under the AIA, finding that the America Invents Act did not change the rule that confidential sales can invalidate patents when the sale’s existence is public.
The Supreme Court held 7-1 that laches cannot be used as a defense to patent infringement that occurred within the six-year statute of limitations — extending Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (copyright) to patent law and eliminating a long-standing Federal Circuit precedent that had allowed laches to bar infringement suits brought years after the patent holder learned of the infringement.
The Federal Circuit held that when a patentee satisfies all four Panduit factors for lost profits — including proving demand driven by the patented feature and no acceptable non-infringing substitutes — no further separate apportionment of those profits is required, because the Panduit analysis inherently ties the damages to the patented features’ value.
The Supreme Court held that supplying a single component of a multi-component patented invention from the United States does not trigger liability under § 271(f)(1), which requires supplying ‘all or a substantial portion’ of the components.
The Federal Circuit reversed a $93 million foreign lost-profits award for ION’s domestic infringement under Section 271(f), holding that the presumption against extraterritoriality barred recovery for overseas contracts WesternGeco would have won absent the infringement — a ruling the Supreme Court reversed in 2018.
On remand from the Supreme Court’s Halo Electronics decision, the Federal Circuit affirmed the jury’s willfulness finding under the new subjective standard but vacated the enhanced damages award, instructing the district court to exercise its discretion anew — illustrating how post-Halo willfulness analysis shifts enhanced damages decisions back to district court discretion.
An en banc Federal Circuit held that a pharmaceutical company’s contract with a manufacturer to produce drug batches — where title to the product remained with the inventor — did not constitute a ‘commercial sale’ triggering the on-sale bar under Section 102(b), clarifying the boundaries between legitimate pre-commercial manufacturing and invalidating sales activity.
The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s use of the ‘broadest reasonable interpretation’ standard for claim construction in inter partes review proceedings — validating the PTO’s approach over patent holders’ objections that IPR should use the narrower claim construction applied in district court litigation.
The Supreme Court unanimously overruled the Federal Circuit’s Seagate objective-recklessness test for willful patent infringement and enhanced damages under § 284 — holding that courts have broad discretion to award enhanced damages in egregious cases of deliberate or wanton infringement, without requiring proof of an objectively reasonable defense.
The Federal Circuit denied mandamus to TC Heartland, a company challenging patent venue in the District of Delaware, deferring to its own longstanding rule that domestic corporations can be sued for patent infringement wherever they are subject to personal jurisdiction — a position the Supreme Court unanimously reversed in 2017.
An en banc Federal Circuit held that a patent owner’s restricted domestic sales don’t exhaust patent rights when clearly communicated restrictions are violated, and that foreign sales never exhaust U.S. patent rights — both holdings later reversed by the Supreme Court in a landmark 2017 patent exhaustion ruling.
The Federal Circuit affirmed a jury verdict of non-infringement for Apple in a wireless patent case, holding that even mathematically equivalent signal-processing operations implemented through structurally different hardware pipelines are not equivalent under the doctrine of equivalents — the different structures matter even if the mathematical outputs are the same.
The Federal Circuit held that there is no universal rule requiring patent damages models to begin with the smallest saleable patent-practicing unit — but remanded CSIRO’s Wi-Fi patent damages award because the district court failed to account for the patent’s standard-essential status when setting the royalty rate, requiring a FRAND-adjusted award.
The Federal Circuit unanimously rejected a patent holder’s constitutional challenge to inter partes review, holding that IPR proceedings do not violate Article III or the Seventh Amendment because patents are public rights that may be adjudicated by an administrative agency without access to a federal court or jury — a foundational ruling for the PTAB system.
In a 6-5 en banc decision, the Federal Circuit held that laches remains a valid defense that can bar recovery of pre-suit patent damages — splitting from the Supreme Court’s copyright ruling in Petrella v. MGM and ruling that Congress had separately codified laches as a patent defense in 35 U.S.C. § 282.
On remand from the Supreme Court, an en banc Federal Circuit expanded direct infringement liability beyond the single-actor rule, holding that an entity can be liable for another’s performance of method steps when it conditions participation or a benefit on that performance and establishes the manner or timing of the performance.
The Supreme Court reaffirmed the Brulotte rule that agreements requiring patent royalty payments beyond a patent’s expiration date are unenforceable as a matter of law.
An en banc Federal Circuit overruled its prior ‘strong presumption’ that claim terms without the word ‘means’ are not means-plus-function limitations, holding that terms like ‘module’ that claim a function without reciting sufficient structure are subject to Section 112’s means-plus-function rules — and typically invalidated for indefiniteness when the specification lacks corresponding structure.
The Supreme Court held 6-2 that a defendant’s good-faith belief that a patent is invalid is not a defense to induced infringement liability under § 271(b) — distinguishing between validity and infringement and holding that invalidity must be raised as a defense, not as a shield against the knowledge element of inducement.
The Federal Circuit affirmed infringement findings in a spinal implant patent case but remanded on damages, holding that lost profits are limited to products the patentee itself sells and that convoyed sales damages require a functional relationship between the patented and unpatented products — significantly narrowing the damages available to Warsaw Orthopedic.
In the first Federal Circuit decision reviewing an inter partes review (IPR) final written decision, the court affirmed the PTAB’s use of the ‘broadest reasonable interpretation’ claim construction standard in IPR proceedings — a ruling that set the rules for thousands of subsequent patent challenges.
The Supreme Court held that appellate courts must apply clear-error review to subsidiary factual findings underlying patent claim construction, while legal conclusions remain subject to de novo review.
The Federal Circuit held that exporting a single ‘main’ or ‘essential’ component of a patented multi-component product from the U.S. can constitute infringement under Section 271(f)(1) — a ruling the Supreme Court unanimously reversed in 2017, holding that a single component is categorically insufficient.